“I was ill-equipped to do anything else,” jokes Amy Sherman-Palladino. “It was survival of the fittest maybe. My father was a comic. My mother was a dancer. It was basically, pick something in show business because that’s all you got.”

“We both infuriate inspiring screenwriters because we’re not the people who wrote a ton of specs. We sort of fell into it,” says Daniel Palladino. “Amy was a dancer. I was a musician. I got a job as a writer’s assistant because typing in the 80s was a rare commodity because everyone wrote long-hand.”

Turning these handwritten documents into typed screenplays taught Daniel the business. “I think I can do this,” he told himself. “Then, maybe the ten thousand hours of watching TV before that as a child just sort of created a natural flare for it — all the time I wasted in my youth.”

Amy got a job writing for the series Roseanne, where she worked for four years and wrote thirteen episodes. A few years later, there was an opportunity to write a “comedic hour-long show” where she pitched several ideas. The one she spent the most time on and even optioned IP for led to crickets, but when asked if she had anything else, she replied, “Just this one with a mother-daughter where they’re more like friends than mother-daughter.” This was Gilmore Girls.

“Amy had written two to three pilots based on mother-daughter relationships that were different from Gilmore Girls. I remember when she pitched it, thinking this should be the last mother/ child pilot you write, and it was ultimately,” jokes Daniel. 

Gilmore Girls ran for 154 episodes on the WB and there’s a four-part mini series on Netflix called Gilmore Girls: A Year in the Life. While Gilmore Girls was on, Daniel ran Season 2 of Family Guy. In 2017, going even more personal, the screenwriters delivered The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, about a female comedian in the 50s who follows her calling once her husband leaves her. 

Quick Witted Characters 

“That’s our internal rhythm,” says Amy of the quick wit and banter on both shows. “If you really pay attention to how people talk, they talk a lot faster than people tend to talk on television. When you have that pace, it does shrink up the time. Scripts might be very large, but it took us time to figure out how long our scripts needed to be to fill the time [as the one page per minute idea changes at this speed with dialogue heavy screenplays].”

“Our scripts on Maisel were in the low 80s [pages] and the timing came out to maybe 50 minutes minutes,” adds Daniel. “On any other show, an 80-page script would probably be 110 minutes of material just because of pace. Our scripts are a little longer because of that. There’s a pace of dialogue on TV that is reflected on TV and not real life.”

Nicole Rivelli
Copyright: Amazon Studios
Description: Pictured: Rachel Brosnahan (Miriam ‘Midge’ Maisel)

For both series, the protagonists Lorelai (Lauren Graham), Rory (Alexis Bledel), and Midge (Rachel Brosnahan) fire off rants, opinions, and references to anyone in their path. “Our energy is a little more like theater. People in the theater tend to talk a little faster. I think it’s fine to get to your point and move a little faster.”

Both shows are also single camera, which is different from the multi-cam shows they wrote on before (Daniel also had credits on Cheers). “Single cam can fit better with our natural rhythms. Sitcoms changed a lot. It used to be more about things than jokes and act breaks. We were tiring rapidly of the sitcom world for that reason. Getting to single cam where you can discuss tone was a natural evolution for us.”

Despite working together in a number of ways, the two don’t write together. “We’ve written screenplays and TV together. We come up with the stories together, either with writers in the room with us, or just alone at our house. From that, we have ideas for dialogue but when we go to type the script, we go to our separate corners, put dibs on certain scenes and divide.” Amy jokes, “It’s why we’re still married.”

Literally, Amy will write with the TV on while Daniel prefers music or even writing in public. “Then we trade pages, edit, and come to an agreement.” 

World Building on the Backlot 

On both of these shows, there’s also a lot of entrepreneurial characters who are working for better lives. Lorelai starts her own Inn on Gilmore Girls and the main love interest is Luke, a diner owner. Mrs. Maisel is rising the ranks in show business as a comic. 

“It happens organically, from however the character is that you set up. Lorelai comes from a successful family and chose to branch out on her own. She didn’t go to college, but was incredibly bright and a real self-starter. When you create a character like that, that character is not just sitting around. That character is thinking beyond her life at this moment. It demands you to ask, what is her dream? What does she think she can pull off?”

Then, of course, there’s the massive runway of 154 episodes to play with. “It was a fun surprise,” says Daniel of the world building and side characters of Gilmore Girls. “It’s one of the reasons why the show is still watched, that we were able to expand their world, especially Stars Hollow. We continued to build out the Warner Bros lot. We slowly started building characters out and it kept expanding.”

Fans of the show love the small town aspects of the fictional Stars Hollow. “People wanted to live in that town and felt comfortable watching the show because the town was so comforting. It’s sort of a fantasy for people who long for a simpler world than ours.”

Amy Sherman-Palladino & Daniel Palladino

Back then, the writers had to fight for the show to be on the lot as most shows were written in Los Angeles and then “shipped off to Canada.” Amy says, “That concept was so foreign to me, the idea that they would separate me from my show. It was insane.” Luckily, they figured out how to keep the show in Los Angeles. 

“We walked one of the business guys around and got them excited that everything could be shot in their backyard. If we hadn’t had done that, we wouldn’t have been able to go outside that much and the evolution of the show would have become impossible if we hadn’t taken over this backlot.”

Full Story Arcs

Where they had 154 episodes for Gilmore Girls, there were only 43 episodes for The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, which had its own pros and cons. “We had to really tighten up the ideas,” says Daniel. “With Gilmore Girls, we were used to using any idea we thought was good because we had 22 episodes to tell stories. We would prefer more episodes quite frankly, 10-12. We think 8 is not quite enough per season.”

“There’s a lot to sink your teeth into with Gilmore Girls. For a lot of people, it’s like painting the Golden Gate Bridge. By the time you get to the end of it, it’s time to start over. People just start watching Gilmore Girls on a loop,” says Daniel. “Now, 22 episodes, we also can’t remember how we did it,” they joke. “It’s such a blur—so many hours and so much work.”

Maisel, being a period piece show, likely wouldn’t have worked in the 22+ episode model. “There’s hours of makeup and hair and placing vintage cars that break down and stall. There’s so much that goes into pulling off Maisel that we couldn’t have done 22, but 10-12 would have been nice.”

Specific numbers aside, the show was originally created to honor Amy’s father, comedian Don Sherman. “He was a comic and all I heard were stories of Greenwich Village, working the Catskills, going on tour, playing Vegas—that was my upbringing. Those were my childhood stories, so I always wanted to dip my toe in the late 50s, right when comedy was starting to shift from take my wife please to Lenny Bruce, relationship, politics, and religion.”

“But, in thinking of that time and as much as I loved my dad, I thought putting a woman in that position was dramatically more interesting. It was such an uphill battle. Forget being in standup, she wasn’t even supposed to have a job. She was supposed to get up in the morning and look pretty for her husband.”